In The Closing Gateway, our first study of Californians' attitudes toward higher education, we noted a parallel between the way many Americans feel about health care and the way Californians feel about higher education. In both cases the public sees access as increasingly important, but as not at all guaranteed for them and their families. People are clearly worried there may come a time when they will need health care and the doors of the doctor's office, the hospital, or the nursing home will be closed to them. They also fear that their family (or a family very much like theirs) will have a highly qualified and motivated family member who cannot get a college education and hence is barred from a decent job and a comfortable lifestyle.

Without pursuing this analogy too far, the health care dilemma may also contain some cautionary advice for California's policy makers in higher education. Because health care practitioners failed to respond to the warning signs and take control of their own industry, others have done it for them. As Public Agenda President Daniel Yankelovich has remarked, "Today it is not at all uncommon to see a highly skilled physician with decades of experience fuming at the sidelines while critical decisions about a patient are made by a recent college graduate who works for an insurance company." The lesson for those who control such an essential public good as higher education, therefore, is to "solve your own problems before someone else solves them for you."

Our research suggests an additional reason for policy makers in higher education to take this lesson to heart. Now that the economic crisis of the early 1990s has receded, Californians seem willing to give the state's higher education leaders some breathing room. For the moment, the pressure is off. But the findings also suggest that if the state's public higher education systems do not respond creatively to the predicted challenges of "Tidal Wave II," the public's call for fundamental change could return with a vengeance. A constituency for sweeping change might threaten the very essence of one of the world's most highly regarded public higher education systems. Thus, higher education leaders would do well to solve these problems while they retain a large reservoir of public support.

Deborah Wadsworth
Executive Director
Public Agenda